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What's Missing? Adding context to the urban response toolbox

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Recognition of the need for humanitarian response to be ‘context relevant’ has been increasing. It comes up in discussions on coordination, accountability, localisation, and effectiveness and is now broadly accepted as something humanitarian response should be striving towards. Despite this awareness, there is little clarity about what context relevance looks like or how to achieve it.

In order to explore whether ‘context tools’ can help improve humanitarians’ ability to think and act more effectively in urban environments, this paper asks the following questions:

• What is context?

• Do we need to understand it to respond more effectively to urban crises? If so, why?

• What are ‘tools to understand context’? How do these differ from one another, and from other sorts of analysis?

• How can humanitarians use these tools most effectively?

Section 1: Introduction

Recognition of the need for humanitarian response to be ‘contextrelevant’ has been increasing. It has featured in discussions around the World Humanitarian Forum (see Knox Clarke & Obrecht, 2015b) and in initiatives to improve humanitarian response in urban areas, such as the Global Alliance for Urban Crises (GAUC, 2015). It comes up in discussions on coordination, accountability, localisation, and effectiveness and is now broadly accepted as something humanitarian response should be striving towards.

Despite this awareness, there is little clarity about what context relevance looks like or how to achieve it. For urban humanitarian response, context relevance requires grappling with complex, interconnected environments.

Although the number of crises in urban areas has risen in the past decade, urban humanitarian responses are still criticised for lack of context relevance, just as they were in post-earthquake Haiti in 2010. Humanitarian response may not always be relevant to the urban context because little is done to understand it. The humanitarian sector requires a cultural shift to recognise the value of understanding context.

Responding to increasing calls for humanitarians to engage with the complexity of urban environments, systems and stakeholders, ALNAP’s 2016 paper ‘Stepping Back: Understanding Cities and their Systems’ argues that understanding urban areas is important in improving response to urban crises, and offers some examples of the sorts of issues and actors humanitarians should better understand. The question remained, however, of how humanitarians can obtain the information they need to understand urban contexts and use this to improve their response.
In the research process for ‘Stepping Back’, a number of tools were identified that had the potential to meet this need. Described as ‘context analysis’, ‘urban profiles, ‘situation analysis’ etc, these tools were different in many ways but similar in that they all sought to improve understanding of context.
In order to explore the potential of this growing body of tools, this paper addresses the following question:

Can tools to understand context improve humanitarians’ ability to think and act more effectively in urban environments?

This main question is broken down into a number of sub-questions:

What is context?

• Do we need to understand it to respond more effectively to urban crises?
If so, why?

• What are ‘tools to understand context’? How do these differ from one another, and from other sorts of analysis?

• How can humanitarians use these tools most effectively?
Using context tools to understand urban areas is a relatively new practice for humanitarians. A number of relevant tools were identified during the course of the research, and this paper is largely based on learning from them. The paper is based on a literature review of over 400 documents, 76 key informant interviews (KIIs) and a detailed study of 25 tools. ALNAP also organised a learning exchange and participated in other events that have contributed to this paper. The full methodology can be found in Annex B.
This paper is aimed at three main audiences:

  1. Operational humanitarians who are unfamiliar with tools for understanding context, what they offer and where to start.

  2. Operational humanitarians already using these tools but facing common challenges and wanting to learn from the experiences of others, and to understand the differences between tools and how they complement each other.

  3. Those who support operational humanitarians, such as donors and policymakers, who want to understand the evidence behind these tools and what is needed in order to use them and their analysis most effectively.

Bite-size material highlighting the most relevant issues for each audience can be found at: https://www.alnap.org/our-topics/urban-response.

Following Section 1 which introduces the topic and research question, Section 2 asks what ‘context’ means, and whether there is a gap in current understanding.
Section 3 explores the possibility of using tools to improve the understanding of context. Section 4 looks at using context tools, including decisions about the scope of analysis, methodologies, when to use these tools, roles and responsibilities, audience and outputs. Section 5 considers how to support the use of context tools, including relationships, individual and organisational factors and funding. Finally, Section 6 draws out conclusions, reflections and recommendations. Annexes include a detailed methodology, and summaries of each of the 25 tools examined.